


Epoch

by ASongofSixpence



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Discovering Powers, F/F, Mac is strong of arm pure of heart and dumb of ass, Minor Violence, struggling with superpowers and also anxiety, superhero girlfriends, tfw your girlfriend can lift a car over her head no problem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-15 00:39:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19284532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ASongofSixpence/pseuds/ASongofSixpence
Summary: Sometimes when they go out together Mac will get recognized and one of her fans will ask her to stop and take a selfie with them. Eliza usually ends up being the one taking the picture, but she doesn’t really mind. It’s hard to be annoyed with Mac’s newfound popularity when Eliza privately thinks it might have been her doing in the first place. (They’d been taking a walk when a distracted driver blew through a red light, almost crushing them and the pregnant woman walking next to them as they crossed the street. Mac had literally caught the car and hefted it over her head, which was terrifying, but also very hot, and someone had gotten pictures. She was signed to an agency practically within the hour.) Sometimes it freaks Eliza out that the person she’s been dating for a little under a year has fan Instagram accounts dedicated to photos of her butt, but for the most part Mac’s borderline fame doesn’t really affect her, so she doesn’t think about it.





	Epoch

**Author's Note:**

> This is an original piece of fiction but what am I supposed to do, make a fictionpress account?? In the year of our lord 2019??? No! I'm going to post my superhero girlfriends here! Please enjoy them. 
> 
> This story takes place in a world where it's very common for people to have Talents, or "powers." Not everyone with a Talent is a superhero; that would be like saying that everyone who’s taken a Poli-Sci class is a lawyer. Most people just use their Talent to make rent. However, there are some people with especially powerful Talents that get signed to hero agencies, which is a great way to become a Big Deal on Instagram.

Mac is taking too long deciding what kind of cheese she wants. That’s what Eliza is thinking about when the front windows of the bodega shatter inwards and Mac throws herself of top of her and Eliza feels her head bounce against the floor and she passes out.  _ Come on, Mac, cheddar or swiss? _ Then noise, then pain, then nothing. 

When she comes to, it’s to the feeling of sliding across the floor. There’s a loud male voice shouting, but it’s hard to make out over Mac’s, which is whispering frantically, “I’m so sorry, honey, I knocked you down too hard. You’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay, just stay back here.”

Eliza blinks a couple times, and tries to get her mouth moving. Mac’s face is upside down, and it takes her a moment to understand that it’s because she’s standing over and behind her; bent double with her arms hooked around Eliza’s armpits, pulling her to the back of the store. “What’re you doing? What’s—?”

“ _ Shhh _ ,” Mac says, quiet but intent. “Just hide here okay? I swear I’ll get us out of this—don’t move too much, I don’t know how hard you hit your head.” She leans Eliza up against the back shelf, hidden by the aisle, then crouches down next to her. “A couple dudes just shot out the windows. I don’t think they saw us.”

She makes to stand but Eliza reaches out and grips the sleeve of her coat. “You should have listened to me.” 

It’s not what she means to say. Mac gives her a wild, frantic smile.

“I know, I owe you like, eighteen grilled cheeses.” She moves Eliza’s hand away, as tenderly as she can. “Now let me go fuck these dudes up,” she says, and stands. 

There’s cuts all over her hands and face. That’s the last thing Eliza’s really able to see before Mac rounds the aisle and is gone from sight. She’d taken the brunt of the glass when she’d jumped in front of Eliza; They’d have to get to a doctor quickly, before the skin healed over. (An unfortunate side effect of regeneration, Eliza had learned.) 

She shakes her head. Maybe she’s in shock? She’s thinking too far ahead; first order of business is get the fuck out of here. She folds herself into a crouch and crawls forward on her hands and knees until she can peek around the aisle. 

There’s two men. One is standing with his back to her, a gun pointed at the cashier, who’s standing behind the counter, trembling, face wet with blood from the shattered glass. The second is already rifling through the cash register, not looking at either of them. Both men are wearing ski masks, but the cashier is saying, “Please, Don, don’t do this.” So it must be more personal than a run-of-the-mill robbery. Why shoot out the windows? 

_ Focus, Eliza _ . Mac is creeping up the aisle, towards the man holding the gun. Eliza watches the cashier pale as he sees her. It’s hard to stop herself from yelling,  _ Let them take the money. Don’t be a hero. Hide here with me, please.  _

She misses her chance. Mac lunges at the gunman and punches him in the back of the head. He makes a terrible noise and falls to the floor like a sack of bricks, but he pulls the trigger. The cashier dives to the floor. Eliza thinks the bullet might have clipped him, but she doesn’t have time to think about it because the man who’d been busy with the cash register looks up and pulls out another gun and fires, panicked, right at Mac, right through her neck. 

There’s sudden silence. “No.” Eliza says, standing up without thought. Running across the store. “No.” Some feeling rises in her that must be horror. Time has slowed. Mac pulls her hand away from her throat and when she looks at it, it’s slick with blood. The air seems to be shimmering, thick with silver thread. Eliza thinks she must be about to faint; she’s seeing things. She reaches towards Mac and her hands close around the light. “N-!” She wrenches backwards. The word falls away. The scene falls away. Her body falls away from itself. 

 

Sometimes when they go out together Mac will get recognized and one of her fans will ask her to stop and take a selfie with them. Eliza usually ends up being the one taking the picture, but she doesn’t really mind. It’s hard to be annoyed with Mac’s newfound popularity when Eliza privately thinks it might have been her doing in the first place. (They’d been taking a walk when a distracted driver blew through a red light, almost crushing them and the pregnant woman walking next to them as they crossed the street. Mac had literally caught the car and hefted it over her head, which was terrifying, but also very hot, and someone had gotten pictures. She was signed to an agency practically within the hour.) Sometimes it freaks Eliza out that the person she’s been dating for a little under a year has fan Instagram accounts dedicated to photos of her butt, but for the most part Mac’s borderline fame doesn’t really affect her, so she doesn’t think about it. 

It doesn’t seem like anyone will be bothering them today; everyone else on the sidewalk is walking with their heads tilted down, trying to shield their faces from the cold. Mac hates this weather more than anyone Eliza has ever met, (claiming it’s her Californian blood,) which is why it had surprised her when she’d insisted they run down to the bodega on the corner and get ingredients to make grilled cheeses. Eliza has been putting off ordering groceries until she gets paid at the end of the week, so the trip outside is a necessity. The bodega is just a block from her apartment, which statistically means they’re less likely to run into trouble. In any case, she feels better about venturing outside with Mac than other people. It’s embarrassing to say it, but it’s slightly less nerve-wracking to think about potential calamities once you’ve seen your girlfriend literally stop a speeding car through sheer force alone. She’s busy mentally adding things to an imaginary grocery list when a familiar feeling grips her. A sudden sense of vertigo; like she’s standing at the edge of a cliff. 

“Hey,” Mac says, noticing her sudden stop. “You good?”

“Uh.” Eliza takes an uncertain step backwards. The wash of dread she feels isn’t part her Talent at all, just a side effect of knowing something is coming. “Maybe we should go home.” 

Mac gives her a pleading look. “Please, babe. I’m so hungry.” She pulls her hand from the pocket of her coat and holds it out towards her, “We’re already here! I swear it’ll take like, two seconds.” Eliza hesitates, and Mac starts walking backwards, curling her fingers beckoningly. “Commere lil’ kitty,” she croons, turning back around. “I’ll totally beat up anyone who stands in the way of me and grilled cheese.” 

Eliza is about to laugh. She’s about to laugh, and say, ‘you’re so annoying.’ But she already had, once. Hadn’t she? And then Mac had held the bodega door open for her, and they’d gone inside together. And after that. After, she had. 

“Mac,” she says, but her throat seems to have swollen closed. The sound gets swallowed up by passing traffic. “Mac.  _ Mackenzie _ !”

Mac finally turns around, and the sight of her face, confused, but alive, unharmed, makes Eliza burst into tears. 

“ _ Hey _ ,” Mac says, looking horrified and rushing back towards her. “Oh, babe—I’m sorry, we can go home. I didn’t mean to—are you okay? Is it a really bad feeling? Hey, wait. Look at me.”

Eliza shakes her head. She can’t speak. Mac pulls her into one of her crushing hugs, and Eliza has a wild passing thought that they’re going to show up in some tabloid:  _ ARCHER _ PROTEGEE CALMS DAMAGED GIRLFRIEND; BREAK UP ON THE HORIZON? Despite this, she can’t bare to push away. Even when Mac bundles her up in her scarf and says, over and over, “I’m so sorry. Let’s go home okay? Let’s go home.”

 

When they make it back to Eliza’s apartment Mac finally lets go of her hand and goes off to the kitchen to call the Chinese place they order from, since their lunch plans have been ruined. Eliza takes the moment to try and get her shit together. She goes to the bathroom and drags a wet rag over her face and looks at her watery red eyes and thinks of a way to say, “I’m not mad at you. I just saw you die, and I think it was maybe a vision. But also maybe it actually happened, and I. I think I did something. I think I?”

When she looks closely in the mirror she can see a thin cut on her cheek, the same place she felt glass cut when the window shattered inwards. There’s a knot forming on the back of her head too, from where she whacked it after Mac threw herself on top of her. It’s hard to know what to make of that. 

When she finally leaves the bathroom Mac is laying on her bed and is queueing up Peaceful Cuisine videos on Eliza’s laptop. This must mean she feels really bad, since Eliza knows for a fact that Mac thinks they’re boring and doesn’t get why Eliza likes them so much. She’s really so sweet—and must be freaking out. Eliza has never cried like that in front of her before. 

“Hey,” she says. 

Mac looks at her with big anxious eyes and says, “I ordered us, like, a gallon of hot and sour soup.” 

“Good thinking.” 

Mac just watches her, clearly too nervous to say anything else. Eliza feels like an idiot. Like she might cry again. She crawls into bed and clumsily puts her arms around Mac’s neck. 

“I’m not mad at you. At all. I—I can’t explain it…” She’s shaking suddenly, which is embarrassing. Mac must feel it because she squeezes her arms around Eliza’s ribcage. “You’ll think I’ve lost my mind.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“I…” She swallows thickly. “I think. When we were standing there and you said we should go in. I remember us going in. I don’t know if it was like…a dream, but. We went in. And there were two men with guns. And I hit my head. And you knocked one of them out, but then the other one also had a gun—you didn’t know, and he shot you. And you were. I think you would have—here, you can feel the bump on my head.” She looks up. Mac’s face, which is usually so open, is inscrutable, but she allows her hand to be guided to the back of Eliza’s head.

Mac rubs her fingers over the bump and winces. “Oof, honey, you gotta ice that.”

Eliza nods, but she doesn’t move. She stares at Mac, anxious for her to say more.

Mac rubs her hand over the back of Eliza’s head once more, then through her hair, pushing it out of her face. “Has anything like that ever happened before? Like… you experiencing something and then… it not having happened?”

“No. I mean. I don’t think so, and I feel like I’d remember it.”

She tucks Eliza’s hair back, then pulls on the lobes of her ears, voice light. “Did you do anything? Before the…dream ended?” 

“Not really.” Eliza moves Mac’s hands from her face and holds them in her own. “Well, there was like. Cords of light in the air? I thought it was because I hit my head. But I… I grabbed one of them and yanked back. And then I was back on the sidewalk with you.”

“Hm.” Mac says, looking up at the ceiling; avoiding eye contact like she knows what she’s gonna say next will make Eliza angry. “I think that…now would be a good time for you to get your Talent diagnosed.” 

Eliza tries to pull her hands away but Mac latches on, intertwining their fingers. This is a conversation they’ve had many times before. Mac has always been adamant that Eliza’s Talent is more than she believes, but Mac had her Talent diagnosed in middle school, and her Talent isn’t something that she could get put away for, like Eliza’s is. Bad luck. Like a threat to society. Like she was a danger to herself and others. 

“What if it wasn’t a doctor who did it.” Mac says quickly. “What if it was someone from Archer, and I just… mentioned you to see what they thought? But didn’t tell them who you were. And then  _ maybe _ , if you feel comfortable, you could meet them.”

Eliza frowns, “...maybe.”

“You don’t have to decide now!” Mac says, “I don’t want you to do anything you aren’t comfortable doing. I just... think that this could be something. And I love you.” 

“I love you too.” She leans up to give Mac a kiss and then sighs, exhausted suddenly. “I need… to lay here for a couple years first.” 

“Yes, definitely. Let me get you some ice.”

By the time Mac is back with a Ziplock full of ice, Eliza has wormed her way under the blankets. Mac peels off her sweater and jeans and then crawls in after her, pulling over Eliza’s laptop and balancing it on her stomach. She tucks her arm under Eliza’s shoulder and hands her the ice, which Eliza dutifully sticks behind her head. She isn’t sure how long they can stay like this: they’ll need to get up and eat eventually, and Mac will go back to her own apartment, and Eliza will lay in the dark and stare at the ceiling and wonder... 

But for now there’s Mac’s heartbeat underneath her ear, loud and sturdy, and it is more than enough. It’s all she can ask for. 

**Author's Note:**

> I have a few little pieces I've been thinking about for this universe, so watch this space if you're into it! 
> 
> Wanna talk to me about crime fighting lesbians? Find me on twitter [@squaasha](https://twitter.com/squaasha/) or tumblr [@starfleetofficial!](http://starfleetofficial.tumblr.com/)


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